Recent Entries from Anuradha VikramMovable Type Pro 4.382015-07-21T01:00:00Zhttp://www.kcet.org/user/profile/cmiller/feed/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=feed&_type=posts&username=anuradhavikramThe Art of Unrest: The Political Undertones of Noah Purifoy and Mark Bradfordtag:www.kcet.org,2015:/arts/artbound//1834.839482015-07-21T08:00:00Z2015-07-23T23:56:24ZThis summer, two solo exhibitions at Los Angeles area museums: "Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth" and "Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada" present significant bodies of work by African American artists, whose careers have blossomed in the city. Anuradha Vikramhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1834&id=17328
Two solo exhibitions at Los Angeles area museums this summer present significant bodies of work by African Americans whose artistic careers have blossomed in this city. "Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth" at the UCLA Hammer Museum presents new paintings and an audio installation by this leading contemporary artist, whose interests and career trajectory reflect the influence of an earlier generation as well as his own upbringing in South Central and Santa Monica. "Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada" at LACMA surveys works from the late 1950s through the early 2000s, tracing how the late assemblage artist, arts educator, and social worker employed everyday found materials in works that bridge painting and sculpture. Both artists are informed by broad trends in 20th century art history as well as by pivotal moments of turmoil within the marginalized communities of Los Angeles.

Bradford carries forward a materials-based approach to art making, established by Purifoy and others in the 1960s, through collecting and excavating. Through paintings made from found materials, a site-specific wall installation, and a sound piece (all dated 2015), Bradford engages the intersectional politics of black and queer identity while maintaining contemporary art language that situates his work within an established conceptual art framework. Bradford came of age in the 1980s, witnessing the destruction of his primary communities of identification by two significant historical events: the HIV/AIDS crisis which decimated the gay scene in Los Angeles and other major metropolitan centers, and the 1992 Rodney King riots, which rekindled much of the latent anger within L.A.'s African American neighborhoods that the 1965 Watts Rebellion had exposed a generation prior. His works channel the anxiety which these tragic events wrought on the landscape of the city while engaging with the scale and politics of landscape in painting throughout the history of Western art.

In the Hammer's lobby gallery, he has ground away multiple layers of paint and wall to create a massive map of the United States in which each state is labeled with its statistical number of AIDS cases as of 2009. The work's title, "Finding Barry," references one of the deepest-buried previous installations to be dug out from the layers of wall: a 2000 installation by San Francisco-based artist Barry McGee, who, like Bradford, brings the language of the street into the gallery and negotiates multiple, conflicting identities. Bradford deliberately uses outdated statistics to highlight the gap between tracking the disease and stopping its spread, while using the map motif to subtly connect HIV/AIDS' global proliferation to colonial expansion and Manifest Destiny, a history fraught with instances of sickness wielded against vulnerable and marginalized populations as well as with religious rhetoric that justified unspeakable violence against these groups. Growing up in L.A.'s gay clubs during the Reagan era, Bradford was painfully aware of the consequences of such moralizing rhetoric for the impoverished and disenfranchised, be they people of color, LGBTQI individuals, or both. His use of the conceptual art strategy of appropriating signs and information to express unexpected ideas is a form of "code-switching," employing visual tropes that shift between art world and community-based points of reference.

A sound installation, "Spiderman," takes the form of a stand-up comedy routine and is the element of Bradford's exhibition most directly pitched toward an African American audience. Working with established cultural tropes, the artist largely disconnects from art world contexts in order to alternate between black and queer vernaculars in his irreverent discussion of the AIDS epidemic and its origins. The work is presented in a bare, darkened room, with a crude closed-caption transcript as the only visual element. A raucous laugh track further situates the installation within the cultural paradigm of the 1980s, referencing the artist's formative experiences reconciling conflicting personal identifications through cultural markers.

The suite of paintings in "Scorched Earth" take Bradford's signature material -- layers of billboard posters, cut through and sanded -- as a stand-in for the body as well as his more frequent subject, the urban landscape. Unlike in works past wherein Bradford's cuts and lines often resembled the layout of streets within the metropolis, the cuts in these works tend to follow a radiating pattern from the center out to the edges of each canvas. Deep gouges, each one fourth-inch wide or more, cut precisely through the paintings' surfaces. Sanded spots appear like welts or lesions on the skin of the paintings, invoking burn scars as well as the cancerous Kaposi's Sarcoma that are a telltale sign of AIDS infection. Certain works, like "Dead Hummingbird," take the motif even farther by combining mottled dark red and black paint to evoke a fleshy wound. Three more large paintings have been created by affixing black paper to canvas using acrylic medium, which causes the paper to shrink and reveal purplish staining beneath. The results appear like mountainous topographies. These works are described as "[approaching] nineteenth-century romantic painting in their massive scale and verticality." Such a claim prompts consideration of how Bradford, and Purifoy before him, engaged with the visual language of Romanticism while abandoning that movement's representational aesthetics.

Romanticism is a 19th century movement in Europe and the United States, born of the desire for a return to deep emotional themes in art in the wake of 18th century Classicism's emphasis on intellectual and historical idealism. It appears against the historical backdrop of democratic revolutions in the U.S. and France, and large-scale colonial expansion from Europe into Africa and Asia and across the United States into territory once controlled by native populations as well as Mexico. Romantic artists emphasized the grand gesture, embracing mythology, allegory, and non-Western source material to describe scenes of ecstasy and horror. Artists sought to invoke the sublime, a combination of exquisite beauty and raw terror that was esteemed as the highest possible affect for a work of art to create. Romanticism appealed less to the ruling class served by Classicism, and more to the new middle class whose recent democratic enfranchisement was reflected in the promise of individual and direct engagement with the art, devoid of complex metaphors and philosophical theories.

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Bradford's paintings invoke Romanticism in their large scale and in the fluctuation between passages of beauty and abjection, disgust, or horror. Though abstracted, traces of landscape remain in marks that resemble rivers, mountains, streets, and craters. The artist's references to the terrors of race riots and epidemics echo in the roughness and irregularity of his surfaces. This tendency parallels Purifoy, whose inspiration for the exhibition "66 Signs of Neon" in response to the 1965 Watts Rebellion was "little mirrored pieces shining up from the ash... Neon signs had melted in the fires and formed little jewel-like objects." Purifoy's desert opus takes the Romantic inspiration further, embracing that movement's love of harsh landscapes and dramatic skies while mounting a heroic, yet pathetic, human-scaled response. At the same time, both artists reject the Romantics' complicity with colonial rhetoric by working primarily with refuse and other "lowbrow" forms, thereby introducing an anti-heroic perspective that is essential in aligning their works with the concerns of the colonized and the marginalized.

Born in Alabama, Purifoy established himself in Los Angeles in 1950 after spending time in Cleveland, Atlanta, and in the South Pacific as a member of the U.S. Navy during World War II. Though he earned a BFA from Chouinard Art Institute in 1956, his approach to art-making was already well-informed by his experiences as a teacher, a social worker, and a Navy construction worker. His artistic practice was galvanized by the Watts Rebellion, a moment when he understood with stark clarity how his personal and professional goals as an artist diverged from his sense of responsibility to the African American community of his adopted city. According to Sue A. Welsh, co-founder and trustee of the Noah Purifoy Foundation, the artist came to realize how "[his] body and mind had been estranged," asking of his fine art education, "Is what I know applicable to me?" He began to wonder what the value of an artistic practice could be to a community ravaged by poverty and brutality, and whether his participation in an art world oriented toward social elites might mean that he was complicit in the oppression of his own people.

Exhibition co-curator Franklin Sirmans, LACMA's Terri and Michael Smooke Department Head and Curator of Contemporary Art, has written that Purifoy was "a devout wearer of the DuBoisian mask," which suggests that the artist walked in two distinct worlds and effectively obscured his socio-political leanings for the benefit of his artistic ambitions. Sirmans clarifies, "Purifoy wore his colors pretty clearly. So, while I allude to the fact that we all don a mask to some degree, I'd say now that the binary suggested by the phrase is more loosely applied here. People were people to Purifoy -- though he knew, as we all know, that people aren't treated the same by all people. In order to accomplish some things, he taught, for others he made art, and for some he served as an artist among bureaucrats on the California Arts Council." Between 1965 and 1987, Purifoy engaged in social service as founding director of the Watts Towers Arts Center and as a founding member of the California Arts Council, while intermittently maintaining his object-based art-making practice.

Though primarily recognized as an assemblage artist, his commitment to community-based art education prefigures a movement toward social practice which has activated art's relationship to audiences over the past two decades. Sirmans explains, "The show, 'Noah Purifoy,' is an exemplar of [LACMA's] long commitment to the artists and art of Southern California. It's fitting that there's work [on view] downstairs by artists like Charles White, Robert Rauschenberg (in Resnick), Ed Kienholz, and David Hammons with whom Purifoy's name often comes up. By the same token, Purifoy's work as a social activist and an artist points to 21st century concerns and is evident of a stance taken by younger artists such as Theaster Gates and Andrea Zittel." It's also striking that Purifoy, whose work shares deep connections with so many internationally recognized artists, has until now been recognized primarily within Californian and African American-focused exhibitions and institutions. Purifoy was acutely aware of this oversight, stating, "I'm not angry about anything anymore... MOCA [Los Angeles] is inclined to show Edward Kienholz. I've been equal to Kienholz ever since I started out, but they never decided to show my stuff. Those are the beefs one could have. I feel equal to Kienholz any day. We've shown together but he's white and I'm black. That's the difference." With the renewed interest in his work enabled by his inclusion in the Getty Pacific Standard Time initiative and the LACMA exhibition, there is hope that this historical omission can yet be rectified.

Within the galleries at LACMA, three distinct bodies of work from Purifoy's oeuvre are on view. A selection of works from the exhibition he co-curated with Judson Powell, "66 Signs of Neon," as a reflection on the Watts Rebellion in 1966, includes objects by Purifoy as well as Debby Brewer, Powell, Ruth Saturensky, and Arthur Secunda. Purifoy's contributions, particularly his works in Plexiglas, are of a piece with those of California contemporaries of the 1960s identified with the Light and Space and Finish Fetish movements, including James Turrell, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, and John McCracken. The next group of works date from 1967-1970, and demonstrate a significant rethinking of Purifoy's approach to materials. In these works, the precision details and tidy finishes of the earliest sculptures are abandoned in favor of a rough-hewn aesthetic that allows found materials such as wood and plastic to maintain their inherent textures and visual characteristics. Like his conceptual art contemporaries including Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse, and Donald Judd, Purifoy made works that are sculptural but also relate to painting, as many are wall-hung and others still contained within rectangular "frames." A third group, dating from 1987 until the artist's death in 2003, aligns with Purifoy's migration from his West Adams studio to the High Desert near Joshua Tree, where he established the Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum populated with massive assemblages situated outside in the open desert air. The scale of these works is vastly expanded from those of the 1960s, and the objects are fashioned to mediate the immense natural landscape in which they are situated. All three bodies of work demonstrate Purifoy's deep engagement with ideas about phenomenology, the human body's experience of space and time as negotiated through our interactions with objects, which has been a central concern of much 20th century art.

Having studied the philosophical forefathers of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, as well as the theories of Sigmund Freud, Purifoy arrived at an understanding of art as visual and social phenomena that would find widespread currency in the art world over a decade after his emergence, with the advent of conceptual art. He used the detritus of the city to address phenomenology as a facet of the Black experience, informed by distinct cultural knowledge yet overlapping with the broad concerns of 20th century modernism. Firmly rooted in the traditions of Dada and assemblage established by Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Rauschenberg, and Louise Nevelson, Purifoy's work nonetheless derives from what bell hooks calls "An Aesthetic of Blackness," which she describes as originating "in the traditional southern racially segregated black community" as "a concern with racial uplift that continually promoted recognition of the need for artistic expressiveness and cultural production." His massive installation in Joshua Tree explores desert phenomenology in a related way to artists of the Land art movement such as Michael Heizer and Walter de Maria, whose work has long been championed by LACMA Director Michael Govan, although its aesthetics and economies are substantially different. It is jarring to see some of the desert sculptures relocated to the museum galleries and contained within discreet sandbox-pedestals. Asked about the tendency of exhibition curators to want to isolate the desert works within museum settings, Purifoy said, "I do have problems with that because they were made to be in the desert. But, when somebody... comes along and offers you a retrospective and promises you some recognition and returns, what can you do? 'I want this piece, that piece, this piece.' Then I say, 'OK, if you could dig it up, you can take it home.'" Such contradictions are endemic to Purifoy, whose mature perspective embraced dichotomies like these as inevitable.

The LACMA exhibition situates Purifoy quite firmly within the Western canon. As an artist with an eye on his place in history, he would seem to have preferred this, stating, "as far as contemporary art is concerned, that's all I've ever done is contemporary art." However, Purifoy's peers in the community of Black artists in Los Angeles, such as Powell, identify influences in his work ranging from George Washington Carver to vernacular architectures of the Deep South to Congolese fetish sculptures. Perhaps rather than wearing a mask, Purifoy can better be understood as "code-switching" much like Bradford: reflecting how the signs he employs carry different meanings depending on the cultural context brought to the work by the viewer. The great challenge posed to those who would historicize and theorize this artist is to reconcile the competing impulses of ethnic specificity and universal accessibility which permeate his practice.

Comparing the two artists also reveals significant contrasts between their experiences across two generations. While Purifoy's approach to "art as a tool for social change" took him out of the art network and market for nearly two decades, Bradford has been able to leverage his profile within the art world to establish a non-profit, Art + Practice, in Leimert Park this past year with the full support of arts patrons and institutions, including the Hammer. Purifoy's legacy has largely been carried by other African Americans, including Powell, Sirmans, and Lizzetta La Falle-Collins (who curated the artist's first museum solo exhibition in 1997), as well as others who knew him personally, such as Welsh and exhibition co-curator Yael Lipschutz. Bradford, who has been championed at all levels of the field and recognized with a MacArthur grant before his 50th birthday, is remarkably only now enjoying his first solo museum show in his hometown of L.A. These developments begin to point the way toward a possible future when African American artists and other artists of color will be granted equal opportunities to influence the culture through visual art with the full support of institutions.

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City Among Nations: Los Angeles at the Venice Biennaletag:www.kcet.org,2015:/arts/artbound//1834.825462015-05-27T08:00:00Z2015-07-28T23:55:56Z"We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles," organized in conjunction with The 56th Venice Biennale, presents some of the city's working-artists, ranging in age from 30-70 and representing a broad range of ethnicities. Anuradha Vikramhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1834&id=17328
At the far end of a narrow walkway in the Dorsoduro district, alongside one of Venice's famed canals, there is a series of magazzini small warehouses that face out over the lagoon. Inside the third of these, the intrepid will discover a return to the artistic heyday of the city-state known as "The Most Serene Republic of Venice." An autonomous democracy governed this region for nearly 1000 years until the establishment of modern Italy at the turn of the 19th century. A haven for arts patronage, the Venetian city-state was a major force in the Italian Renaissance, producing the likes of Tintoretto, Titian, and Veronese. However, the artists in "We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles," curated by Elizabeta Betinski as an official collateral exhibition of the The 56th Venice Biennale, are not Italians. They are representatives of the contemporary city-state, Los Angeles, a place where the Biennale's theme, "All the World's Futures," can be experienced on a daily basis.

What's notable about "We Must Risk Delight" is precisely that none of the artists included are international luminaries, of which Los Angeles undoubtedly has its share. Rather, the exhibition presents the city's immeasurably talented working-artists, ranging in age from 30-70 and representing a broad range of ethnicities, as well as a slight majority of female artists. "Our participation in art conversations on an international level can not be reserved only for superstar names: not if our interests as a community are to keep growing and keep relevant," curator Elizabeta Betinski explains. "Too few of us get the kind of opportunity we just experienced at the Venice Biennale and I truly hope to see that change for Los Angeles artists within my lifetime. 'We Must Risk Delight' was created in an effort to affect that change." The exhibition has been a labor of love for the curator and the artists, who continue to seek financial support for their endeavor. "Democratization is, to me, an issue that needs to be addressed," says Betinski. "We can either complain about -- and thus contend with -- the 'art market' and its inherent elitism, or we can give effort to expanding the playing field and creating opportunities for more than just a select few." She continues, "L.A. has one of the most vibrant and exciting contemporary art scenes in the world -- yet, our perspective on being a part of a larger world is still very myopic and out-of-sync with the amount of creative talent and diversity L.A. has to offer." Such diversity, while not the cause of the show's success, is important because it reflects the progressive values of a city that is increasingly hailed as a crucible for working artists, as well as being notable for its multicultural and gender-balanced community and presence of multiple generations of artists all supporting one another.

Thematically, the exhibition's focus is transcendence of real-world limitations, and the art on view speaks to the possibilities of fantasy and imagination to lift us above our daily challenges. That utopian spirit is also typical of Los Angeles, a city that is in many ways an impossibility, wrested from the desert that perpetually threatens to reclaim it. The artworks on view take a variety of forms, from Tanya Batura's surreal ceramics suggesting organic growths made of eyes, to Robbie Conal's nostalgic portraits of 1960s pop icons Bob Marley, John Lennon, and Jimi Hendrix. Kenturah Davis' contribution, four large-scale drawings depicting African-American subjects whose images are comprised of written text describing their aspirations, speaks to both the challenges and the ambitions of L.A.'s creative class.

Painting is everywhere, most of it boldly colorful. Amir H. Fallah exhibits two paintings from a recent series in which he reconstructed the lives of a married couple based on diaries and objects procured from an estate sale in East Los Angeles. Alexandra Grant and Sherin Gurguis, two artists currently featured in the COLA award exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, are represented with exuberant works on paper that dazzle against the brick walls of the magazzini space. Grant shows two works from her "Century of the Self"series, proclaiming "I was born to love not to hate," and Gurguis contributes intricately patterned cut-paper works that riff on traditional Islamic screen work. Gurguis also contributes a large, ornamental cut-out sculpture alongside sculptural works by Ben Jackel, Margaret Griffith, Rebecca Niederlander, and Jamison Carter. Carole Silverstein, Mark Licari, and Shizu Saldamando also dazzle with color, though on a smaller scale. These three artists each embody a distinct Los Angeles vernacular in their very different bodies of work: Silverstein working with pattern and landscape, Saldamando in figuration to describe local archetypes, and Licari bringing the psychedelic perspective.

Despite L.A.'s international stature as a film capital, the moving image is less prominent in the show, although animations by Stas Orlovski and Carolyn Castaño, and Natasha Prosenc Stearns' sculpture and video installation, ensure it is not left out of the discussion. Photography is also less visible, though well-represented by Brandy Eve Allen's intimate portraits. Alexis Zoto is the only artist to respond directly to Venice as a site, creating an installation in dazzling gold around a large chandelier that evokes the ersatz Baroque aesthetic of Venice's many palazzos, while incorporating pre-Columbian geometries that speak to the contemporary hybridization of culture across place.

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Reflecting that hybrid reality and the broadest possible scope of geographies, the 2015 Biennale encompasses pavilions from 87 countries as well as 42 collateral exhibitions. Still, no other city occupies a footprint comparable to L.A.'s this time around. In addition to "We Must Risk Delight," L.A. artists figure prominently in Okwui Enwezor's main exhibition. The Giardini's Central Pavilion features legendary Angeleno artist and CalArts faculty mainstay, Charles Gaines, with an installation of his recent "Notes on Social Justice" and plexiglas 'Librettos' works (the latter also on view at Leimert Park's Art + Practice until May 30). The Biennale's live program - one of three key thematic areas or "filters" - also features monthly live performances of Gaines' master composition based on five "Notes on Social Justice" texts. The first of these featured a male and female vocalist in duet, accompanied by a string quartet. Future performances over the course of the exhibition will layer and multiply texts and compositions from the five source texts. Both the installation and the live performance use canonical documents from the history of social justice movements as their basis, building on a body of work that has incorporated the words of Susan B. Anthony, Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X. By appropriating these texts whole and treating them with visual and auditory lyricism, Gaines defuses the oft-leveled criticism of political art as aggressive or alienating, instead drawing viewers in with beauty and warmth while allowing the eloquence and commitment of the original speakers to come through with clarity.

Adjacent to the Gaines installation is a gallery of recent works by L.A.-based Walead Beshty, whose works include a number of "Aggregate" sculptures (2013) constructed from production discards from Guadalajara's Cerámica Suro, a long-established industrial ceramics producer and exporter. The sculptures, covered in thick, drippy paint, are as vulgar and chaotic as Cerámica Suro's wares are precise. These works, accompanied by collaged sculptures made from cut-up Guadalajara tabloid newspapers draped over metal poles, respond to the official and unofficial economies of globalization by foregrounding the commoditization of human bodies and folk cultural traditions for casual consumption by Mexico's elites and their wealthier neighbors to the north.

Additionally, CalArts graduates Matt Lucero and Tuan Andrew Nguyen are included at the Arsenale with their collective, The Propeller Group, whom Angelenos may remember from their humorous video installation commenting on global corporate culture at 2012's Made in L.A. Biennial at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. In Venice, they are represented by a block of ballistic gel containing an AK-47 bullet and an M-16 bullet shot at one another, which upon fusing come to represent a merger of American and Soviet military histories in the aftermath of the Cold War -- think Afghanistan or Syria for some real-world examples of how this plays out. The AK-47 vs M16 (2015) also includes a slow-motion animation of the bullets passing through the gel, which creates an abstracted forensic map of contemporary global conflict.

Another notable Angeleno at the Biennale is Vanessa Beecroft, an Italian-born artist whose installation "phantom limb stone garden" at the Italian Pavilion made up of figurative sculptures in bronze and shades of stone reminiscent of the range of human skin tones. One of her most ambitious and successful sculptural installations, the work cannot be viewed in its entirety as it is intentionally blockaded by large, rough-sided marble slabs. The fragmented viewpoint of the observer and the truncated female bodies within make reference to Marcel Duchamp's final work, Étant Donnés (1946-66), a Surrealist-inspired tableau referencing both theater and early cinema, which prefigures Beecroft's more than twenty years of work responding to the tropes of contemporary high fashion.

Los Angeles' emergence within the international contemporary art landscape speaks to the city's position at the forefront of worldwide trends. While the Biennale's pavilions appear to celebrate nationalism, increasingly one finds within them artists from many countries (Spain and Belgium being notable examples this time). Los Angeles exemplifies a future in which metropolitan areas are in direct dialogue with one another, around the globe, through cultural as well as commercial exchange. Comprised of residents from all parts of the planet, Los Angeles boasts a majority-minority demographic that other European and American cities are destined to share. The city is shaped by its national context, but also shapes it, and acts as a hub for international cultural exchange. L.A. is uniquely positioned to serve as a model for the world's cities going forward, being already invested in seeking ways to develop more equitable, sustainable, and liveable conditions for its citizens. Given how the city's contemporary artists reflect and promote those concerns, it's no surprise that they are so prominently represented at a global exhibition focused on the future.

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Alma Ruiz: Former MOCA Curator Discusses Three Decades at the Institutiontag:www.kcet.org,2015:/arts/artbound//1834.817962015-04-30T00:00:00Z2015-06-09T23:49:47ZAlma Ruiz, the former Senior Curator at MOCA, discusses her three decade tenure at the arts institution and what lies ahead for her future. Anuradha Vikramhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1834&id=17328

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MOCA Senior Curator Alma Ruiz has spent over three decades at that venerable Los Angeles museum, during which time she has exhibited some of the most influential and experimental modern and contemporary artists in the world. Ruiz is perhaps best known for two major exhibitions at MOCA that rewrote the recent history of contemporary installation art to include a Latin American perspective: 1999's "The Experimental Exercise of Freedom" and 2010's "Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space." The 1999 exhibition introduced Los Angeles audiences to the participatory art of Brazilian Neo-Concretists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, while the second built on the precedents of the first in establishing a Latin American foundation for the conceptual Light and Space movement that is generally associated with California artists like James Turrell and Robert Irwin. This past March, MOCA announced Ruiz's retirement from the museum after 31 years.

During her tenure at MOCA, Ruiz served under four directors: Richard Koshalek, Jeremy Strick, Jeffrey Deitch, and Philippe Vergne. She worked with internationally-renowned Chief Curators Paul Schimmel and Ann Goldstein, and curated solo exhibitions by leading artists including Ernesto Neto, William Kentridge, Ana Mendieta, Gabriel Orozco, Piero Manzoni, Ad Reinhardt, Lynda Benglis, and Francesco Vezzoli. When change and controversy hit the museum like a hurricane in 2012, Ruiz was one of only two curators left on staff following a series of high-profile firings and resignations. Throughout it all, she has remained a thoughtful and steady presence, committed to doing challenging work as a scholar and curator, and to creating a program of exhibitions that reflects the diversity of Los Angeles' community and art audiences.

Following her departure from MOCA, Ruiz is slated to curate an exhibition of Venezuelan artist Magdalena Fernández at the museum's Pacific Design Center location in the fall, and has recently been appointed curator of the 20th Paiz Biennial in Guatemala City in June 2016.

Artbound recently caught up with Ruiz to discuss her tenure at MOCA and what lies ahead for her future.

Your career at MOCA spans 31 years. What has it been like to be part of a museum that was only a few years old when you joined, and to help it grow into a world-class institution?

Alma Ruiz:I think I have been lucky to see MOCA go from being the new kid on the block to becoming a mature institution. The museum's early years were really exciting, despite the fact that there was a lot of work to do. But there was a very special group of people who wanted so much for Los Angeles to have a museum of contemporary art that they worked extremely hard to make it a reality and under the leadership and vision of Richard Koshalek the museum transformed itself, in a few years, into a world class institution. He was really a tremendous influence -- in my career, I can say he was someone that I have tried to emulate throughout the years because I learned so much from him. He led by example, he encouraged new ideas, he respected the staff tremendously, and despite having a senior curator and later a chief curator, he always met with all the curators. He wanted to keep that connection, which for him was vital, but I think also for the curators because they never lost touch with the museum director. And I think he also set the tone for the museum's relationship with the artists, who always came first.

During his tenure, no exhibitions were canceled once they had been put on the schedule, and he made a tremendous effort to fundraise for those projects to happen no matter what. So, I think that under his direction the museum had tremendous stability and we all benefited from it. We all worked well together and were able to accomplish a tremendous amount of work. But I also think that MOCA was a product of very special circumstances, and I don't know if it would happen today in the same way. [I was] at MOCA for 31 years - I came right after I finished graduate school and came back to the U.S. I had been away for three years in Italy working on an MA degree, and then after eight months of being back in Los Angeles I began to work at MOCA. Not necessarily as a curator, but it was a time in which the museum was a place in which you could grow along with the institution.

So I think of MOCA being a product of a very, very special time in Los Angeles, after the Pasadena Museum of Art closed, and as a result of this tremendous desire that a lot of people in this city, including a large number of artists, had for a space to showcase contemporary art, the museum happened, and once it was up and running the collector support poured in, in the form of extraordinary collections that were gifted to MOCA in the 1980s. For example, the Taft and Rita Schreiber collection, the Barry Lowen collection, and the Philip and Beatrice Gersh collection, also the acquisition of the Panza collection helped make MOCA into a world-class institution and it is a time that I treasure tremendously. Also, some of my former colleagues like Julie Lazar, who as curator of media and performing arts, curated "Available Light," which was commissioned for the inauguration of the Temporary Contemporary (now Geffen), Kerry Brougher who is now back in Los Angeles as the Director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Museum, and also Ann Goldstein who was the director of the Stedelijk Museum for about three or four years, and then Elizabeth Smith who is now the Director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York, we were all part of this amazing time and I think it really made us what we are today professionally. So, I think that it was terrific to be there at the beginning, to see an institution grow and mature and distinguish itself for new programming, for edgy programming, for showing work in non-traditional art spaces like the Geffen Contemporary -- I think MOCA was one of the first institutions to use this kind of non-traditional space for its exhibitions -- and also for its architecture program even though I don't think architecture was actually something that contemporary art museums embraced easily, and MOCA was the west coast museum that in time became an important venue for architectural exhibitions. So, I think that I learned a tremendous amount at MOCA - that it was a very good school for me -- and I do treasure every one of those years.

How has your work been affected by economic and demographic shifts in the city of Los Angeles over the past three decades?

AR: Well, I think that my work has certainly been affected by these economic and demographic shifts in the city. Having been here for such a long time, I think that the ups and downs affected the museum, certainly in terms of its exhibition program and being able to maintain a staff that was reasonable in proportion to the institution's needs. Sometimes, you know in lean times, exhibitions had to be downsized or postponed to balance budgets but early on, exhibitions were never canceled. I think that is something that has certainly changed. Nowadays exhibitions are easily cancelled. Contracts are rescinded. Staff is fired overnight, and I think that many see this as a quick solution to a problem, but in the long run this behavior is very damaging to the institution and to the trust that supporters put in the institution, and I think that that's really something that, somehow, we don't think about as much anymore. Museums are institutions that need trust. They need to maintain a certain trust with their supporters to function. But, what museums have to do is to act promptly depending on the situation, and I think that working as a curator, you also have to be flexible and adapt in circumstances like that.

Can you describe how you responded to the controversy at MOCA that left you as only one of two curators on staff in 2012?

AR: Well, it wasn't easy to work under such trying circumstances, but I tried to stay focused on my projects and on the museum's role as an important cultural center in Los Angeles. We were short-staffed, I think that is acknowledged by everyone, but we were all trying to do our best. We also knew that the situation had to be temporary, and were looking forward to a resolution that would bring the museum back to its former self. There were low moments, but in addition to myself who was there for 31 years, MOCA has a core group of people who have been there for a long time. Some of them have been there for 20, 25 years, although because they occupy positions that are not public, they may not be known to a large number of people. They are very experienced and sophisticated, and I think it was this group who kept the museum going during such difficult times and who should be acknowledged for that reason. We talk about Directors and curators, but there were a number of people there who were instrumental in maintaining the museum during those difficult years, and of course the Board is also important to acknowledge at that point, but I cannot deny that those were hard times and that I'm happy that they have been left behind.

Did the departure of the museum's artist trustees at that time affect your ability to realize your own goals and projects? Were you involved in rebuilding those relationships?

AR: The departure of the museum's artist trustees did not affect us in any visible way, I think, but I assume that people's opinion of MOCA certainly changed because of their departure. I'm sure that it affected the way MOCA was able to fundraise. I am sure that many people probably wanted to support MOCA but decided to wait until things improved. I wasn't directly involved in rebuilding those relationships with the artists or trying to lure them back to MOCA. Three out of the four who have left, returned, and the other one didn't because he had already committed himself to another institution, but they acknowledged the work that the curators had done throughout those difficult years, and were pleased and grateful that there was continuity in the museum's operations thanks to the staff that remained there during those hard times.

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You were responsible for organizing exhibitions that introduced Los Angeles to some of the most formative and influential modern and contemporary artists to emerge from Latin America, particularly informing the areas of installation and participatory art. Do you feel that the canon of recent art history has been effectively enlarged by your work?

AR: Yes, I do. I think that certain artists I committed early on are now part of that canon. Artists like Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Gabriel Orozco, for example. I think that it would be difficult to teach a course on contemporary art today and not include these artists. Their practices have changed the way other artists think about art. Two exhibitions, "Experimental Exercise of Freedom and Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space," which I did in 1999 and 2010 respectively, were key to show our public that art could be participatory, that art could be seen in a different way. That visitors should not only look at a work of art but be part of it, that in some instances art does not achieve full meaning without their involvement. "Suprasensorial" was very special in that it showed our visitors that art can be a collective experience and that it can have a greater meaning when shared with family, friends, and strangers alike. That art can be many things, including immersing yourself in a swimming pool where all your senses can be activated, that art can be experienced in a "suprasensorial" way as Hélio Oiticica used to say. For example in this exhibition we also had a fantastic penetrable by Jesús Rafael Soto, the Venezuelan kinetic artist, and after this exhibition happened at MOCA, LACMA installed a small Soto penetrable in one of its courtyards, and I think that work has become one of the museum's most popular outdoor sculptures. Children love it. They enter it. They play in it, and it's actually being showcased as part of their fiftieth anniversary. Many of the artists and the exhibitions we have shown have effectively touched our audience in very special ways, and many of these artists are to become part of this canon. The kinetic artists from Latin America are now becoming household names. They are being presented in exhibitions around the city here, and I think people are beginning to recognize their contributions and feel more comfortable discussing their work.

How does the upcoming Getty PST LA/LA initiative build on your scholarship over the past few decades? Have you been very involved in its development or related projects?

AR: No, I am not involved in the development of any of these projects, but I think MOCA will be. I see the upcoming Getty PST LA/LA initiative as an acknowledgement of Latin America as a region that has been fertile ground for new ideas since the beginning of the twentieth century. Even with efforts such as mine and those of colleagues in other private and public institutions around the US, the history of art in Latin America is still not well known, but better known than 30 years ago. My most ardent hope is that PST will help erase once and for all the stereotypes we still hold about Latin American art in the United States. I think that the scholarship that results from all these exhibitions will advance the field to such an extent that many more artists will be integrated into the history of Western art, and I think that as happened with the last PST that focused on California, it'll be a boom for the artists who will be showcased in the exhibitions. They will become better known and they will be looked at more frequently, they will be studied, they will be reviewed, and I think that they will eventually be integrated into a larger history of Western art.

How has the museum field adapted to new developments with respect to contemporary art history and audiences?

AR: Museums are always looking for ways to improve or adapt to new developments. At MOCA, we consistently presented Latin American art from 1996-2015. I can now see through its future programming that African-American artists are being showcased more frequently in projects and monographs, and that's a good thing. MOCAtv's reaching a large demographic group through social media, and that's a project that was started in 2012 and it's been tremendous in terms of its reach, so that's also a very good thing. I think that museums have to adapt. They have to look at what's going on, and be quick on the step to adapt, but they also have to keep a certain balance in that museums are educational centers and they cannot be a fad. They cannot just follow fads or follow popular culture, because they run into the danger of becoming too superficial and I think that this is something that we seem to struggle with all the time -- how could they be popular but still do a programming that has depth, that has scholarship, that has a certain integrity. It's happening a lot, we can see that in museums around the country and I hope that museums learn from each other's mistakes, because they do happen, and that eventually they may attain a balance. But things are happening very quickly, so I think that also some of the missteps that have taken place lately were unavoidable because of the speed with which things are changing today.

During your tenure at MOCA, you worked with four Directors. How has the role of the Museum Director been changed or preserved by these very different personalities? Can you contrast the leadership styles of a curator-director, a businessman-director, or other styles you've experienced, from your point of view as a curator?

AR: It is true, I worked with four Directors, and briefly met our founding director Pontus Hulten back in the early 1980s. They all have led MOCA in different ways. I think that in terms of leadership styles I prefer what I call the Director-Director vis-a-vis the Curator-Director or the Businessman-Director. I believe that a Director should focus on leading the institution towards the realization of its mission and the Director should let his curatorial team organize exhibitions, but not be a curator. I think that because many Directors come from the curatorial field they don't want to lose touch with that, and many of them want to curate exhibitions, but I have not found a Director who can successfully be both. I think that you have to be very, very careful, and if you make the decision of becoming a Director you need to focus on that aspect of your career, and I think that also goes for the Businessman-Director.

I think that Directors should have business acumen, but not direct the institution as if it were a for-profit company because museums are non-profit, and they need to be run efficiently and on budget to be successful, but need to keep in mind what the ultimate goal or mission of the institution is. So, looking back at the four Directors that I worked under, it seems to me that Richard Koshalek really understood his role as Museum Director because he did not curate exhibitions. He was at MOCA for twenty years, and did not curate exhibitions until the very end. He co-curated with Elizabeth Smith "At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture" which opened in Tokyo in 1998 and in Los Angeles in 2000, and he was the leading curator for the Richard Serra exhibition which happened around that time as well, 1998, but in the exhibitions that he had something to do with, there was always a curator who took the lead for them, and I think that is important. Sometimes a Director needs to curate through other curators, but he needs to focus on what a Director needs to do which is lead the overall institution. Fundraising is very important. A Director needs to focus most of his time on fundraising, most of his time on also maintaining and building relationships with the community: supporters, trustees, collectors, etc., but on a directorial level, not on a curatorial level which are two very different things. With Philippe, I only worked with him for a year so I really don't know him well, but I think that he has what it takes to be a Director and many opportunities to be successful.

Although you have now retired from your position as Senior Curator, you remain involved with MOCA as curator of the upcoming Magdalena Fernández exhibition. What can we expect to see when this Venezuelan artist's work is unveiled at Pacific Design Center this fall?

AR: I'm really excited that the museum has allowed me to curate the Magdalena Fernández exhibition, which is something I had started doing at MOCA before I left. For me, it's always very exciting to introduce new artists to our local audiences, and Magdalena is really new to many. She has shown very little in the United States, and I think that her work is going to be a revelation to many people. She is an artist who was trained in the Bauhaus style and who has a deep commitment to geometric abstraction, given the tradition of that kind of art in her country of Venezuela. So, she brings that into it, but she also brings nature and sound and movement into her works. The exhibition at the Pacific Design Center is not going to be a large one, because the space doesn't allow for an in-depth view of her work, but we have made a selection of six video works and one installation to show. The show will take place in early October, and I think that, as with some other artists that I have shown in the past, she will hopefully be a breath of fresh air and someone that other artists will appreciate, and that our audience will like.

It's hard to imagine that a curator as active as yourself could ever truly retire. Do you have any independent projects on your radar that you're excited about realizing in the coming year or two?

AR: I think it was somewhat misleading for me to let MOCA use the word "retirement" when I left the museum, because moving on doesn't mean stopping to work altogether. I left MOCA, certainly, because I felt that after 31 years it would be wonderful to start a new chapter, and to continue to curate but perhaps in a different way. I am now very busy with a new project. I'm curating the 20th Paiz Biennial for Guatemala City for June 2016, and I am very happy about that project. Curating a biennial is very much like organizing an art exhibition, but I am excited about doing a large-scale exhibition outside the museum walls, which is something that Hélio Oiticica, the Brazilian artist, was very interested in doing when he created his own work. He always talked about taking the work beyond the museum walls, and so this is going to be an opportunity for me to do a large exhibition in a non-museum setting and I'm also excited about bringing the biennial into the streets of downtown Guatemala City to make it more accessible, to make it more democratic, if I can use that word. I'm traveling to Guatemala next week, and will remain there for three weeks to begin working on the biennial and to start thinking about its theme. It's an international biennial, so I'm hoping to invite a really interesting group of international artists who will have an opportunity to engage with the culture and the art of the country, and also to provide Guatemalan artists with a platform through which they can actually connect and relate to art beyond their borders. I'm really excited about that project, and I have about a year to organize it so there's going to be a lot of work, but really a wonderful project that I'm looking forward to.

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Outside the pristine white warehouse that houses Art + Practice is a lively street filled with chatter and laughter. Inside, stillness: the silent scores of Charles Gaines' solemn "Librettos: Manuel de Falla/Stokely Carmichael." At first glance, the white cube gallery seems far removed from the vibrant neighborhood in which it sits. Anticipating a community center, one instead finds a museum. The Gaines show is programmed by the Hammer Museum as a complement to the L.A.-based artist's retrospective "Gridwork: 1974-1989" and installed as impeccably as its pedigree would indicate. Yet the values that underpin Art + Practice are not those of a typical art museum, in which silent reflection in the company of objects is generally of primary importance while audience engagement is a secondary, if growing, priority. Flipping this equation, Art + Practice foregrounds social welfare services while preserving a space for quiet contemplation that many of its constituents are rarely able to access. This combination presents uncommon advantages as well as challenges, positioning the organization to serve two very different constituencies with potentially complementary, but also conflicting, needs and expectations.

Art + Practice is a non-profit launched by celebrated artist and MacArthur fellow Mark Bradford with partners, social activist Allan diCastro and collector and philanthropist Eileen Harris Norton, in Leimert Park. The new space joins neighbors Papillion Art, The World Stage, KAOS Network, and Eso Won Books (soon to relocate to a space within Art + Practice) within the arts corridor along Degnan and Leimert Boulevards. This is one of Los Angeles' most compelling and long-established arts enclaves, representing the spectrum of performing, cinematic, literary, and visual arts. Says diCastro, Art + Practice's Interim Executive Director, "we are dovetailing into an already existing history of cultural variety." Spaces with a quarter-century of history in the neighborhood intersperse with new arrivals bearing a post-conceptual aesthetic. "In order to change things and be a part of the conversation, you have to take a vested interest in the neighborhood," explains Bradford in the catalogue that accompanied Art + Practice's recent launch. "You have to be present in the community." Through both its architecture and its programming, Art + Practice reflects the shifting concerns of Leimert Park's long-established Black community as the neighborhood responds to economic and social changes and prepares for still more. The pending arrival of the Crenshaw/LAX Metro in 2019 has many residents anticipating sweeping changes as the close-knit and somewhat isolated local community expands to accommodate an influx of newcomers. At the same time, local artists and activists are working to ensure that the established cultural character of the neighborhood is not lost as so often happens when ethnic strongholds become desirable real estate.

Art + Practice is not the first socially-minded contemporary art venue to open in a historically Black community with aspirations to connect under-served audiences with post-conceptual art practices. A leader in this space is Rick Lowe, whose Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas, has served as a model for how to equitably and sustainably promote social change through the arts for over 20 years. Lowe is a member of Art + Practice's Board of Trustees along with prominent leaders from museum, entertainment, and social activism backgrounds. Others who have followed Lowe's lead include Theaster Gates' Rebuild Foundation in Chicago and Edgar Arceneaux's Watts House Project in Los Angeles. DiCastro calls these precedents "definitely inspirational," adding, "Anytime you extend a hand in a community it is to be applauded." Considering how Art + Practice is likely to draw affluent art audiences to the under-resourced neighborhood of Leimert Park, he states, "I would say the risks, if any, are far outweighed by the rewards of bringing another layer of culture into the area."

Art + Practice demonstrates a commitment to the needs of Leimert Park's residents by hosting non-profit social welfare organization, The RightWay Foundation, within its space. "RightWay Foundation has a large potential benefit, as a social organization" housed at Art + Practice, "because it is specifically located within a zip code (90008) that has an enormous foster youth population," explains diCastro. Adds Bradford in the catalogue, "I believe contemporary artists have a lot of great ideas, but unlike those working in the field of social service they don't always apply those ideas directly. Art + Practice aspires to be a space where the social aspect of art - the practice of it - puts the art into a context of action." RightWay works with youth in the foster care system to instill self-esteem along with practical skills, targeting a vulnerable population who are over-represented in historically Black communities like Leimert Park as a consequence of devastating policies around drug use and incarceration. Connection with an arts public has been valuable for RightWay, as Director of Programs, Andraya Slyter describes: "Being housed within an arts institution has exposed the art community and patrons of the arts to the experiences and needs of Transitional Age Foster Youth and has evoked a strong desire in these individuals to assist the RightWay Foundation [to] carry out its mission and vision by serving in various capacities (volunteers, mentors)." RightWay's facilities include a large classroom space and a computer lab, as well as free access to Art + Practice's exhibition and artist in residence programs. Says Slyter, "Exposure to the arts diversifies and enriches our youths' experiences and interests. Although some of our youth have been involved in the arts, they find it necessary to shift focus from their interests to their basic needs due to homelessness, unemployment, and mental health instability." In response, "The RightWay Foundation can assist them with meeting their social and emotional needs while they are given opportunities to explore their interests through the arts. Art can also be used as a therapeutic tool to explore and share their experiences." RightWay clients also benefit from technological tools developed by artists through Art + Practice to address issues endemic to foster youth, such as disconnection from siblings and family members, in a direct way. The organization's residency is in effect through 2016.

Exhibition programming at Art + Practice is overseen by the Hammer Museum, another program partner through 2016. The inaugural installation by renowned artist and educator Charles Gaines is both historically and politically charged.

"The Hammer and Art + Practice decided that Charles would be an ideal artist to launch the exhibition program at Art + Practice because of our respect and admiration for his work, his role as a longtime educator and mentor to other artists, and his relationship with Mark Bradford, which started when Charles taught him at CalArts," explains Hammer Senior Curator Anne Ellegood, who organized the Gaines retrospective currently on view at the Hammer and the exhibition at Art + Practice. Engaging themes of race and class consciousness, Gaines pairs the libretto of Manuel de Falla's "La Vida Breve (The Brief Life)" (c. 1904), the tragic tale of a young Gypsy woman whose love affair with a man of the upper class ends in her rejection and death, with a 1967 speech delivered by Black Panther and SNCC activist Stokely Carmichael, in which he challenges Black youth to value and respect their own cultural heritage instead of aspiring to white cultural values. The work is constructed of Plexiglas boxes with de Falla's score and libretto written on the surface, and Carmichael's text printed behind, such that the two disparate scripts play off one another visually. Though separated by language, continent, and context, both sources blend considerations of racial difference and discrimination with questions of class and social access, subjects likely to resonate with an audience of neighborhood residents and youth in the foster care system.

"Charles created 'Librettos' for the Art + Practice gallery," says Ellegood. As a site-specific work, it's quite a provocative response to its context. Gaines' choice to include de Falla's composition, which speaks to racial and economic segregation but also represents the European classical tradition, diverges from Carmichael's lament that "they teach 'em Bach, Vivaldi, Rachmaninoff, and all those other cats" but not Miles Davis, Mahalia Jackson, or Ray Charles. The work of Black contemporary artists is fraught with such contrasts, reflective of the pressures they face to represent their own cultural viewpoints while negotiating a system of recognition and reward that continues to treat white artists and white cultural touchstones preferentially.

Similarly, one wonders how Carmichael would respond to the white cube of the Art + Practice gallery, which recalls the architecture of mainstream art institutions more than that of the Black Arts Movement venues that have preceded its arrival in Leimert Park. Museums still maintain an appallingly poor record of engagement with minority audiences, especially Black ones. Art + Practice's own literature puts the percentage of minority "core visitors" to museums at 9 percent, meaning that the percentage of people of color who visit museums consistently is 13 percent lower than the percentage of minorities in the U.S. population on the whole. The American Alliance of Museums' 2010 report "Demographic Transformation and the Future of Museums," from which Art + Practice's statistic is presumably cited, paints an even more dismal picture, indicating that as minority representation in the general population has increased, museum attendance by minorities has continued to decline. Not only are museums failing to attract new minority visitors as the population becomes more diverse -- they are failing to retain the minority visitors they already had, resulting in a much wider gap in representation within museum audiences than within the population as a whole. Asked about these numbers, diCastro states, "Only time may provide us all with more statistics to analyze these concerns."

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Ellegood expresses how her staff "recognize that minorities are under-represented as visitors to museums," and how they "were excited to collaborate with Art + Practice on an initiative with a goal to increase visitorship in these under-represented communities." She continues, "It was important to us and to Art + Practice that the gallery be free (as is the Hammer) and accessible, and we are all committed to presenting a program of exhibitions and public talks rich with diversity."

Some of those programs include artist residencies by artist and former Leimert Park gallerist Dale Brockman Davis, who showed celebrated Black artists including David Hammons and Senga Nengudi at the start of their careers, and Mexican-American painter Sandy Rodriguez, who will discuss her work about transformative and sometimes violent changes in Los Angeles in conversation with Angel's Gate Cultural Center curator and director of visual arts, Isabelle Lutterodt, at Art + Practice on March 18 at 7:30 pm. An upcoming exhibition later this spring will highlight the work of these artists along with a third L.A.-based resident artist, Pakistani-born sculptor Aalia Brown. In the fall, Art + Practice will present the work of Nigerian-born, L.A.-based figurative painter Njikdeka Akunyili Crosby, followed by a retrospective of pioneering assemblage sculptor and Watts Towers Art Center founder John Outterbridge in December.

In addition to its focus on social activism, Art + Practice also aspires to be a platform for the creation and presentation of new works of art. According to Ellegood, "Exhibitions at Art + Practice will generally (although not necessarily exclusively) include new work by artists." Being situated on the site of Bradford's former studio and his mother's former hair salon, Art + Practice inherits a legacy of artistic creation as well as social cohesion from these two preceding venues. The inclusion of an artist in residence program further advances that promise of creation, as well as allowing the youth and community members whom Art + Practice aspires to serve access to working artists and to the creative process. Such exposure promises to open up a world of inspiration to a population too often expected to prioritize survival over imagination. It can be hoped as well that art-savvy audiences who make the trip to Leimert Park to appreciate Art + Practice's innovative programming also come to recognize the rich cultural resources that precede its arrival in the neighborhood.

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Javier Tapia is a Chilean artist, based in Denmark, and currently an artist in residence at 18th Street Arts Center. His exhibition opening November 7, "Travelling Dust," is a multidisciplinary project in collaboration with artist Camilo Ontiveros. "Travelling Dust" seeks to explore the shared culture between the United States and Latin America. The artists consider themes such as history, geopolitics, immigration, diaspora, artistry, and even the Hollywood film industry to seek out graphic representations that have stayed in the imaginary of the region.

Tapia grew up in Chile, where he studied Visual Arts at the Pontificia Universidad Católica for the first four years of his formal education. After finishing his degree there, he decided to explore different contexts for his practice, so he went to study art theory in Barcelona, Spain, at the University of Barcelona for three years. Once he finished his program there, he decided he wanted to challenge himself by working within an even more different culture to his own. This brought him to Copenhagen, where he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 2004 to 2010.

In Denmark, although Tapia experienced some culture shock, he also found the Academy very welcoming and was able to take his art in new directions. There he found different forms of support, not only in the form of encouragement by his mentors, but in the form of sponsorships for travel and production from the Royal Academy and the Danish Arts Council. He was able to take advantage of this support to make his work, and also to do extensive traveling. These travels have taken him almost every year to Chile since 1998, and have taken him to a residency in Istanbul as well. "When you live abroad, your country, your roots, your identity becomes a big part of the work you do," he explains.

It was through the Academy that he ended up in Los Angeles for the first time in 2007, where he connected with the city and decided to come back and spend a year studying at UCLA in 2009. This was when Tapia met Camilo Ontiveros, who was pursuing an MFA there at the time. In a way, "Travelling Dust" is a project that has been in development since Tapia and Ontiveros met. Their long conversations about shared experiences and getting to know one another are a large part of what the project is about. Tapia expressed the importance of building relationships and how that was a major influence on the project. "I see every project as an opportunity for learning. This collaboration with Camilo has the potential to teach me, and open in my work possibilities of growth," he says. Ontiveros moved to Southern California from Mexico as a young child, and lived in Orange County and San Diego before moving to Los Angeles to pursue his MFA.

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In Tapia's studio at 18th Street Arts Center, one might ask about the origin of some of the items that are being collected or borrowed from archaeologists, while others are bought at flea markets or similar local stores. It's not easy to tell where each object came from just by looking at it. Says Tapia, "This project has been a very intense process that started five years ago, but it was cemented in the last two months prior to the opening." Many of the objects have a very personal connection to the artists. For example, in one corner of the studio there is a stack of cases of Pacifico beer, which turns out to be brewed in Ontiveros' hometown; besides that there is also a stack of bags of beans imported from Mexico. Food and alcohol are two aspects of the project, but others include textiles, dolls, books, photocopies, music, ceramics, and copper. The process of making this work has been an exhausting search for items that can communicate the concept that the artists have in their heads about origin, identity and nostalgia. This search has involved extensive traveling and meeting with archaeologists, artists, sociologists, barbershop owners and family members.

What place do these objects have in contemporary art? That is precisely what this project seeks to explore. Tapia expresses how "We like to make a project that puts up questions, these questions aim to help us understand our history." The artists have been exploring these subjects for five years, but it is the journey and the process that is important. It is a process of learning. They are not trying to teach Angelenos about Los Angeles or the United States' roots; they are only sharing their own stories and perceptions, looking to comment on parallel realities, conceptual loops, and the stories behind the objects that describe a series of relationships. For Tapia and Ontiveros, as Chilean and Mexican artists, the goal is to find common ground.

While looking for a shared culture is one major element of the project, another important element is contrast. Within Los Angeles exist plenty of geopolitics informing racial divisions. What does a project like this achieve when it is realized on the Westside? How will this project be perceived differently when it is shown on the east side (as it will be at the Vincent Price Art Museum on November 15)? The artists present the audience with their vision, but ultimately the goal is to create a dialogue and inspire viewers to share their own point of view. Just as Tapia and Ontiveros have been in conversation for years, they hope that others will be inspired to discuss the same issues.

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Top Image: Javier Tapia, La Tirana research image, unknown photographer from 1980s, courtesy of the artist

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18th Street Arts Center Turns 25tag:www.kcet.org,2014:/arts/artbound//1834.768482014-10-20T22:00:00Z2015-01-06T00:55:03Z18th Street Arts Center was established 25 years ago to offer a home for artists operating on the edges of artistic practice and social visibility in Los Angeles.Anuradha Vikramhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1834&id=17328

In October, 18th Street Arts Center celebrates a quarter-century of service to the artists of Los Angeles. 18th Street's origins reflect a turbulent time when the mainstream of art and culture was being called into question for exclusionary tendencies and an attraction to the ever-present lure of money. Founders Susanna Bixby Dakin and Linda Frye Burnham sought to create a non-profit that would serve the needs of Los Angeles artists directly by offering studio space, opportunities to exhibit and perform, and a community of peers. They developed a home for artists operating on the edges of artistic practice and social visibility. Time seems to flow in cycles, and so on the eve of 18th Street's 25th anniversary, we meet again at a crossroads: one path illuminated by the hot flame of the avant-garde and DIY traditions of Los Angeles; the other by the cool, neon glow of the global contemporary art market. As 18th Street prepares to celebrate with a benefit on Saturday October 25 and the annual Beer, Art, and Music festival on Sunday October 26, the institution looks back on its beginnings and its role in the development of Los Angeles as an international art destination since 1989.

Writing in "The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism" in 1990, Burnham recalled how in the mid-1980s, "I was fed up with the art world entirely." She recounts that her reconciliation with art was brought about through the work of John Malpede and Los Angeles Poverty Department, a collective whose performances created with and for the inhabitants of Skid Row continue to liberate art from its baser concerns and refocus it on issues of importance -- poverty, incarceration, addiction, and human rights. Malpede and partner Henriëtte Brouwers, who have called 18th Street home for the past several years, have recently been acknowledged for their radically accessible artistic practice with a retrospective exhibition, "Do you want the cosmetic version or do you want the real deal?" Los Angeles Poverty Department 1985-2014 at the Queens Museum, which called the collective "an uncompromising force in performance and urban advocacy for almost 30 years." In addition to creating transformative art, LAPD has helped to transform policy by working tirelessly on behalf of downtown L.A.'s poorest citizens, who lack access to basic utilities and services.

18th Street has been and remains at the center of the emerging discipline of public practice. Like Malpede, Suzanne Lacy was engaging in these disciplines since before they had names and reading lists. She situated the Otis Graduate Public Practice program, which she founded, at 18th Street because of these connections. With Leslie Labowitz-Starus, she created "The Performing Archive" at 18th Street, which traveled to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and the Haus der Kunst in Berlin, and which she describes as "an important exchange" in which "young women artists...encounter an extensive paper and image archive of feminist performance art." Artists like Malpede and Lacy don't approach art as a way to express individual experiences or emotional responses to an audience. Instead, they facilitate interactions or mine archives to address a subject from a more collectivist perspective. For them, art is a way of speaking out against injustices such that citizens, media, and even public officials can be motivated to act; however the way in which art expresses its politics is shaped by realities understood both individually and within a community through poetic and aesthetic forms.

Such an approach to art as a force for social action rather than private contemplation marks a significant art historical shift which many scholars attribute to a global shift in social and economic thinking in the year 1989. With the fall of Communism and the rise of developing markets, this period signaled a re-centering of culture and capital away from the magnetic poles of the United States and Western Europe toward emerging economies in Asia, central Europe, Latin America, and the Arabian Peninsula. It seems fitting that 18th Street would be born of this era; likewise that it would grow from an institution focused largely on the needs of artists local to Los Angeles into one that would integrate the concerns of the region's artists with a variety of international perspectives. Some artists who visited 18th Street have since gone on to major artistic recognition, such as UK-born Phil Collins, a video artist now based in Berlin whose topical works combine documentary techniques with an artist's speculative imagination. Shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize in 2006, Collins was described as "instigating unpredictable situations [which] encourages people to reveal their individuality, making the personal public with sensitivity and generosity."

The international visiting artist program which began in 1993 with a single artist from Australia has since grown to serve over 400 artists from 50 countries. Artists have come from as far away as Nepal, home of painter Hitman Gurung, whose work confronts social issues such as economic migration and urban pollution. Visiting artists have gone on to have exhibitions in Los Angeles, some even to relocate here. As Marius Engh, an artist in residence from Norway who attended in 2013, explained, "I will definitely come back to L.A. for the relationships I made, making friends and [meeting] former friends from L.A. [...] I enjoy the setting, the friendliness, and good times in the sun." His comments are deceptively casual, reflecting the city's art scene, which conducts serious business in a relaxed manner that international artists frequently acknowledge as an unusual and highly favorable attribute of Los Angeles compared with other major art centers. In keeping with the concern that has always been central to 18th Street's existence, the international visiting artist program has also served the needs of Los Angeles artists by initiating contact with a global community -- one which has come to recognize the city as a worldwide hub for contemporary art practice in the intervening two decades.

18th Street Arts Center has never operated primarily as a gallery, but exhibition programs have played an ongoing role in the institution's history. Early exhibition programs such as Crazyspace, created by Asher Lauren Hartman, were run guerilla style with an expansive, anything-goes approach. Artist Rochelle Fabb recalls of her time as a member of the Crazyspace curatorial collective, "The only rule I knew of was that you could do whatever you wanted, as long as you returned the space to its original condition when your creative work was finished." She describes an "ultimate endgame, [where] time was extended, emotions and senses heightened, events unreal, and you knew you would be changed somehow, if not a better person, once you had emerged as the audience participant." Important exhibitions in 18th Street's main gallery have included the first showing in southern California, in 2004, of Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones' historic documentary photographs of the Black Panthers from 1968, and Richard Newton's "Have You Seen My Privacy?" in 2011, which anticipated the selfie-surveillance economy of social media and smart phones through performances and interventions in the exhibition space. "Postcards from Tehran," also in 2011, brought the work of Iranian artists never before seen in Los Angeles to exhibit with the work of California-based artists of Iranian descent, at some risk to the curator and certain participating artists, and at a time of historic importance for that country.

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Since 2012, the Artist Lab Residency has utilized 18th Street's gallery as a working studio for Los Angeles artists to develop commissioned new bodies of work while revealing their processes of creation to an audience during visiting hours. Recent Artist Lab Residents have organized performances, panel discussions, and performative lectures that further contextualize the artists' research interests and approaches to art-making in dialogue with the public. Artist Lab residents have included Michelle Dizon, Eamon Ore-Giron, Adriá Juliá, and Patricia Fernández, each representing a unique perspective on artistic process and research. Additional exhibitions in the Atrium Gallery feature visiting and local artists in residence, as well as emerging artists from Los Angeles and the wider world.

18th Street Arts Center recognizes its evolution with a program of performances featuring Barbara T. Smith, Dan Kwong, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Phranc, Angel Luis Figueroa and Los Tres Caballeros, and DJ Ofunne, along with a benefit art sale featuring over 40 alumni artists and a presentation by Highways Performance Space, on Saturday October 25 from 6-10 pm. On Sunday October 26 from 1-5 pm, the celebration continues with the 5th Annual Beer, Art, and Music Festival featuring over 40 craft breweries, with music by KoTolán, Nick Shattuck, Trapdoor Social, and DJ Shayn Almeida. All event proceeds benefit 18th Street Arts Center's public programs.This event marks a milestone but more importantly it represents an opportunity to see this vital, stable, and groundbreaking institution into the next quarter-century. Turbulent times are when we need art the most, and ever more rapid changes lie ahead.

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Top Image: Svetlana Darsalia, performance at Crazyspace, 2003 | Courtesy of the artist

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Making Monsters with Miljohn Ruperto and Aimée de Jonghtag:www.kcet.org,2014:/arts/artbound//1834.758342014-09-11T08:00:00Z2015-01-06T00:55:11ZThe new exhibition "Mineral Monsters" features flickering animations of rocks that challenge normal stereo vision and experience.Anuradha Vikramhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1834&id=17328

Miljohn Ruperto's Artist Lab residency and exhibition at 18th Street Arts Center, "Mineral Monsters," is an interdisciplinary exploration of human vision and experience. The starting point for Ruperto's collaboration with illustrator/animator Aimée de Jongh and neuroscientist/engineer Rajan Bhattacharyya is a quote from philosopher Georges Canguilhem's book "Knowledge of Life:" "there are no mineral monsters." Canguilhem, who wrote about the effects of pathology and disease on the human psyche, meant to suggest that minerals would form according to their own internal structures and not according to human expectations of ideal or universal standards that he described in the practice of medicine and biological sciences. Ruperto and company take this pronouncement as a prompt to explore the limits of our ability to project ourselves and our interests -- as individuals, as a species -- onto everything we encounter. The three will present their collaboration and insights in a panel discussion in 18th Street's main gallery on Tuesday, September 16. The exhibition is on view through October 3.

The animations of rocks on view in the gallery are so simple that they are barely animations. Two frames flicker, triggering the left and right eye so as to challenge normal stereo vision. The rocks take on unusual qualities against their cave-like backgrounds. Ruperto describes how "the 2-frame animation is composed of the left and right eye views cycling back and forth to trick the eye into experiencing parallax and therefore a 3D effect. The effect is popular in GIFs and is at other times called wiggle stereoscopy or 'piku-piku' ('twitching') in Japan." Specimens have been chosen collaboratively for de Jongh to render using Adobe Photoshop and TV Paint. She adds, "Each stone is digitally hand drawn on the computer, and each animations consists of just two frames: the right-eye view and the left-eye view. By rapidly switching back and forth between these two frames, an illusion of space, or 3D, is created. During my stay here I tested different types of animation, style, and intervals. I based the rocks on existing minerals that we selected."

Miljohn Ruperto is a Los Angeles-based graduate of Yale and UC Berkeley whose work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial 2014 and in Made in LA 2012. His first collaboration with Netherlands-based de Jongh was "Janus". Says Ruperto, "I wanted to work with Aimée again after the wonderful animation she did for 'Janus', which we showed at the Whitney Biennial this spring. I felt that we could somehow look a bit deeper into what constitutes 'animation', which 'Janus' was interested in. I wanted to think about the process of animating by using as a starting point a neutral ground: the inertness of mineral. The mineral monster quote by Canguilhem set us onto the path." Canguilhem is concerned with how scientific thinking seems to privilege an ideal form for each specimen it describes, one that becomes normative but is potentially unattainable and clashes with individual realities. Science as Canguilhem describes it is a process of typifying individual examples, such that the individual is never fully aligned with the characteristics of its type, and the inevitable dissonances are regarded ontologically as abnormal. He argues instead for the "anomal," understood as idiosyncratic without the abjection associated with disease. Minerals, he argues, can exist in this anomal state, being resistant to human-imposed aestheticism of the kind that he identifies in the life sciences. Says Ruperto, "I have been fascinated with Canguilhem's quote since I was made aware of it. The possibility of a neutral material or a neutral ground seemed full of possibilities."

Ruperto's interest in animation as a medium to explore these themes is rooted in his reading of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. "I started thinking about animation when I read Agamben's 'Notes on Gesture'. In the text Agamben talks about Tourette's syndrome and its relation to cinema. The twitching rocks are a bit of a joke on that. His idea of the image becoming both an entombment and also an exploding out when in cinema was the idea which spurred my interest in animation." Agamben is interested in how gesture - informed by the posture, movement, and affect of a living body -- is approximated but not replicated through the rapid staccato of the cinematic image. Neither a living being nor a static image, early cinema completely re-orders our understanding of gesture by isolating it from context. Agamben describes Tourette's patients as symptomatic of an era in which gesture has become fractured and indistinct due to a loss of social cohesion around the bourgeois lexicon of actions that defined the modern era. His argument is akin to the postmodern view that signs and symbols are today subject to potential slippages of meaning and not fixed or mutually agreed as in the past. Ruperto's body of work consistently questions the production of social and academic knowledge through images that operate in this state of slippage or indeterminacy. Here, he echoes the isolated gestures of silent film by reducing animation to its simplest elements.

De Jongh has been living and working at 18th Street Arts Center as a visiting artist in residence since August. She explains, "Miljohn invited me to come to 18th Street Arts Center to work on a show with him. He wanted me to make animations of scary or disgusting rocks, in other words: 'mineral monsters'. That was something I hadn't done before, because I normally focus on animating characters." She concedes that what makes a believable animated character is very different from what she and Ruperto are trying to do. Instead, they are exploring ways to trigger an unsettled reaction that is the kiss of death in traditional animated films. Says Ruperto, "I actually do not remember where the 3D animation started. Aimée sent me some wiggle stereoscopy GIFs which I thought were quite inspiring." He was keen to get a scientific perspective on his ideas, and consulted with Rajan Bhattacharyya, a neuroscientist and engineer whose work focuses on the brain's systems of data comprehension and translation. "Rajan and I started talking about ascribing anthropomorphic qualities upon the drawn mineral specimens. And it all started to make sense during our talks. Aimée started drawing samples (at first rocks that were rendered more realistically). Through her research, we found a more hand-drawn style which we all liked. We agreed on the 2-frame animation (left eye, right eye) which was an animation pared down to its bare constituents." The three sought to develop an image that would cause a viewer to become conscious of the work that our eyes do naturally. Disassociating our eyes from one another, it causes us to recognize ourselves as seeing in a way that we rarely do otherwise.

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"The animation then is barely an animation," Ruperto admits. "I think Aimée does not even think it's a real animation with just two frames." He describes it instead as a series of still images that diverge from stereoscopic norms. "It's really the temporal ordering of the left and right eye views. It's as if you stared at a finger in front of you and closed the left eye with your right eye open and then switch to the right eye open and the left one shut. If you keep up the opening and shutting, the finger would seem to be moving, yet it really is your viewpoints that are animating the object." For de Jongh, the experience of creating an image that unsettles our expectations of vision and action was novel. "I'm a commercial animator for TV, a comic artist for a newspaper, and a freelance illustrator. I hadn't worked in an art space before and I've never had a show in a gallery like this. I've been a part of some illustration shows, but this was entirely different." Throughout August, the pair worked in the gallery to develop the styles and techniques as well as the presentation of the forms. "We chose 'weird' rocks from internet pictures and pictures from other people that barely look like standard minerals," explains Ruperto. "We chose ones that look a bit organic. Since we wanted to make unstable images, the initial image should also be on the cusp of being a rock." Indeed, the forms do not adhere to typical expectations of what a rock would look like. Even so, they are based on real examples. The 2-frame method operates as a dialectical space that pulsates with the tension of opposing binaries -- alive/dead, organic/inorganic, dimensional/flat.

For the artists, the residency at 18th Street Arts Center was an unprecedented opportunity to dive into collaborative art-making head-first. Ruperto describes the process of working with specialists in other disciplines: "I wanted the collaborative process to be more parallel than an intersection, but in the end it did work out in terms of specialized knowledge vectors intersecting into the project. I feel this would be the usual natural way when people collaborate - drawing all of us into the project's own orbit." Asked if the different backgrounds of the collaborators ever generated conflict, he says, "I think when you trust the expertise of the other persons, there really isn't any anxiety." De Jongh agrees. "Working with an artist such as Miljohn also gave me an insight into that world, which was very interesting." Ruperto elaborates, "Plus the project itself required expertise outside of the other's field. So I think everyone was somewhat prepared." Such cross-disciplinary discourse is a unique characteristic of 18th Street Arts Center's Artist Lab Residency, in which the gallery functions a meeting point for dialogue between artists and knowledgeable, passionate people from every walk of life. "Mineral Monsters" is exemplary of the important role that arts and culture can play to establish a social context for the innovations in visual storytelling, information technologies, and bioengineering taking place all around us.

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Patricia Fernández: Translations of Memorytag:www.kcet.org,2014:/arts/artbound//1834.728232014-05-15T08:00:00Z2015-01-06T01:06:36ZPatricia Fernández cultivates and shares a symbolic archive of Spanish Republicans' flight into France, a path known as la Retirada, to escape persecution in 1939.Anuradha Vikramhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1834&id=17328

Patricia Fernández' "Points of Departure (Between Spain and France)" considers the forms that history takes in the context of war, displacement, and political persecution that has reshaped our notions of geography and place over the past century. Fernández' work is on view through June 27 as part of 18th Street Arts Center's Artist Lab Residency, a three-month studio residency for which Los Angeles-based artists are invited to develop projects that make their working processes transparent for the benefit of a visiting public.

As the descendant of political dissidents in Fascist Spain, Fernández was born in 1980 into a newly liberated country still reckoning with the legacy of Franco's dictatorship. Upon returning to Spain as an adult, she became intrigued by the materials, some commonplace, that represented an otherwise lost historical record of dissent, struggle, and displacement. After meeting a family friend, an anarchist who had fled the country but later returned, she began to trace the paths that Spanish Republicans had taken through the Pyrenees to escape persecution in 1939, known as la Retirada. Hiking the trails is an act of endurance that allows her to physically synthesize the actions and the memories of the survivors whose stories she articulates through her body of work. These walks produce drawings and texts, inspired by conversations with nonagenarian Spanish expatriates still living in France, which Fernández renders as a historical archive of their displacement. Through actions -- walking, painting, hand-copying maps and documents, presenting slide lectures about materials from the archive - she absorbs history and reproduces it as a living, contemporary force.

As an Artist Lab Resident at 18th Street Arts Center, Fernández continues to develop a symbolic archive of the Spanish Republicans' flight into France that stands as a testament to the absence of a historical archive in the Municipal Archives of Bordeaux where many of the displaced took refuge. Likewise disappeared are records of French Jews who fled into Spain in the early 1940s, fleeing the Nazi advance into France. Survivors attest that the records were stolen by the Vichy regime, the French collaborationist government that sought to mask Fascist crimes. Fernández' work cannot replace the stolen archive, but operates instead as a collective memory palace built of ephemera and personal narratives.

Fernández' work is distinguished by the care with which she constructs the materials of her ghost archive, as well as the forms which support and display them. Painting, textiles, drawing, sculpture, and woodworking are integrated into her practice. She understands the physical labor of making these forms to be another way of processing the stories that she collects into memories, and making them her own. Hand-built objects in the gallery include wooden furniture and a ceramic tiled floor. The latter represents the now-broken floor of the train station in Canfranc where waves of Spanish and French refugees crossed the border during the war, tracing paths that we are now invited to retrace as we peruse the assembled archive.

Because the work is based on stories that have been shared with her personally, Fernández is committed to sharing them on an equally personal and direct level with audiences. She does this through weekly performative lectures in the gallery, held each Friday evening, in which she explores one or another aspect of the archive such as the history of a single family or city. These lectures are not recorded, as she does not wish for the information to be mediated but rather to be communicated conversationally in a way that encourages both attention and intimacy. In the spirit of that one-on-one dialogue, 18th Street Arts Center's Director of Residency Programs, Anuradha Vikram, sat down with Fernández to talk about her ongoing project and her installation in the Artist Lab.

How did you become aware of the history of la Retirada?

Patricia Fernández: I had spent about two years on a previous project where I was collecting buttons from family members. It began with my grandmother's buttons. She wanted to share the stories with me that were embedded in the buttons, and for two years I collected these objects and then I exhibited the collected buttons arranged in what I saw as constellations. I made a whole installation with these memory objects. A close family friend told me about how buttons had served him in his life, particularly during the beginnings of the Spanish Civil War and after. He told me about his own collection of buttons coming from the northeast of Spain -- in Barcelona and Sabadell, very famous for textiles -- where his mother worked at a textile factory and they would strip all the buttons off the clothing because they had so much worth. He collected these buttons as a memory of his mother, quite representative of the kind of craftwork that was done at this time, and also used as a currency to cross over the border.

When I heard that he crossed over the border in 1939, I began to ask more questions about his political affiliations and I discovered that he came from a family of anarchists, and he -- unlike many of the Spanish Republicans -- was actually allowed to re-enter Spain. I wanted to know more about the history of the Spanish Republicans in Spain and learn about it through someone who had direct experience. That's how it began.

In the next phase, you took a residency in Bordeaux, on the French side of the border. Is this when you began to develop interviews with people who had made this crossing through the mountains?

PF: Since he had done the crossing, he explained to me the path as he remembered it, and then I went on that walk which began in Portbou over into Cerbere, right along the Mediterranean coast, and into the south of France. Once I was in France, I traveled to Bordeaux.

This wasn't specifically the reason why I went to Bordeaux, to interview people who had done this walk. I knew that there had been a very big and permanent Spanish exile population that had remained there, and I was curious about the cultural inheritance of these immigrants in this small city. I didn't know that many of them had actually done the same walk that I had just taken that month. When I arrived in Bordeaux I began to interview Spanish exiles, Spanish Republicans who had also taken that path, and they re-told their own experience of the walk, and then they wanted to know about my walk and what I was doing there. It became a way to connect these histories.

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When you're making this archive that we see in the gallery, what are the different kinds of materials that you collect into it, and what are the materials that you produce and add to the archive?

PF: The way that I understand a lot of archival practices to work is that you compile this information and it's available for a viewer to look through, and oftentimes I feel like it hasn't been processed yet by the person who has collected the information. Because there was such a massive amount of information and so many things I didn't even know I would be learning about when I began this project, it became really important to attempt to understand the mass of information. At times I was literally taking documents that people were giving me -- for example, letters that had been written by the father of the son of a Republican that I met, or photocopies of books that were written by people that had done this walk -- all of these elements that were voluntarily added into the archive by others, and I attempted to internalize them in a way. I would make handwritten copies, or translations.

Everything in this archive is a copy in some way, everything is constructed or somehow mediated through my hand, and I wanted that to be apparent. It's a copy of a copy; it becomes important for the viewer to see that I am transforming the material. I'm more interested in how the history is mediated, transformed, or transcribed than just this very objective account. I'm really interested in the subjectivities of the individuals. And therefore oftentimes I'm the one choosing the objects to add to the archive and other times they're just handed to me, but in some way they are always passed through my hand.

Following on the question of re-making objects and processing the objects through your hand, what are the sculptural forms that you're working with that are not necessarily drawn from the documents that you've collected, but are more of a support for the materials as they function in the space?

PF: These sculptures that I'm constructing are really presentation devices -- they're tables. I wanted to construct a setting that was very similar to the experience that I had of looking at archives in the Hôtel des Archives in Bordeaux, which is the municipal archives, where I went every day and found absolutely nothing, but just the fact that I was able to go through all these papers and touch everything and look at all these old posters, handwritten notes, observations...there was something really sensory about that experience. So here, I came and laid out all my stuff on the ground so I could sort it and organize it, and the tables, the sculptures, are presentations that highlight certain things for the viewer to look at. The viewer is allowed to come in here and touch these elements.

When you approach making these forms, are you drawing from techniques that you are already comfortable with, or are you learning new material techniques in order to execute a project based on your concept?

PF: I have often made furniture works or pieces that resemble functional objects. It's always a challenge -- I definitely make these pieces from drawings, so oftentimes I don't know how to even begin to make something stand up -- so it's really a learning process for me. Working with glass is also new. I definitely have this idea in my mind and then I try to figure out how it is going to be constructed. I wanted to reconstruct the space of these archives, and I made this drawing of what the space looked like and how I wanted people to enter the space, and then it was about finding the pieces to make it happen.

I'm also using woodcarving; I learnt how to do this by watching my own grandfather (who refused to teach me). It was the thing that grandsons were supposed to learn, not women, so he would say "you don't want to learn this, don't do this," but I learned by copying him. If you spend time with someone or something long enough, eventually you'll learn something.

Would you say that everything that you do in terms of producing objects that expand on the material documents of the archive is still really about the handmade, and only using technologies that incorporate the hand in some way?

PF: I'm learning of these histories and these stories because they're passing through bodies, because they're being spoken, how things pass through our hands. It's very important that a body can record a history, or to know how history is carried and located in the body. Everything that's tactile is a way to write these things out through the body.

How does your weekly Friday evening performative lecture series operate within the structure of everything else that you're doing?

PF: I had this great opportunity of doing a three-month residency to really just go through everything. I've been trying to go through all these materials that are laid out here on the floor. The lectures, for me, are a way to perform these histories and keep these stories alive; it's also an exercise of memory. I went on these different walks; I've done four out of the five very important walks that the Spanish Republicans took when they left Spain. I will be returning soon to do another one, but who knows -- once I'm there, there might be this other path that I find. The paths aren't really even marked by signs, and they go all over the mountains.

The lectures are about sharing these histories of the people that I met, also about the responsibility of the younger generations. I actually did my first lecture on this idea that the descendants carry these stories, and in a way unless we re-perform these stories, they may get lost. There are a few documents or stories that were passed on to me from certain Spanish Republicans that I met, stories that had never been published, had never been translated or discussed or brought to light, and I found that it was important to share these, to insist on their importance. I was meeting the Spanish Republicans, most of them now in their 90s. Some of the people I interviewed are actually no longer with us, so it was really about this urgency to communicate their stories.

That's why I wanted to do the Friday talks. It's about talking and sharing stories. I found that when I went to France to talk with some of these people that had never returned to Spain, that remained in exile there, and when I later traveled back to Spain to see my grandparents, I became this vessel of information, this vehicle, and it was really amazing. What happened was that a lot of the stories these people in their 90s told me about, I shared with my grandparents who are also in their 90s (but decided to stay in Spain during Franco's regime), and one story being passed onto the other person activated another story and there was a communication that was happening that was not there before.

For someone who's coming into the gallery, what do you think that you would like for them to get out of the experience of looking at your work?

PF: One thing that I find that I love, when people come in here and I tell them a little story, is that they'll share something about their own family history or their past and we begin to ask questions together. We even talk about current-day politics. More than anything, I want these objects to activate a conversation. For me, these paintings, the drawings, the sculptures in the space are containers for information that is being passed. If someone can begin to ask a question about what this means, and where did this come from, then we can have a really interesting conversation about how memory constructs history, our role in constructing that history, and how we write our past, how we have these shared histories, and how they overlap.

I'm taking a very small group of histories of political exiles, but at the same time their plight and their difficulties and the things that they were fighting for can be equally experienced with another subgroup or subculture. It's important to have this conversation about why am I looking at things from the past, because really a lot of these subjects are being discussed today in contemporary Spain, and a lot of the crimes that were committed during Franco's era are still being questioned today. It's something that a lot of us are maybe not aware of if we don't live there.

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The Curatorial Arts of Yael Lipschutztag:www.kcet.org,2014:/arts/artbound//1834.708082014-03-11T08:00:00Z2015-01-06T01:07:10ZYael Lipschutz is organizing a body of research around the intersection of art and technology for her residency at 18th Street Arts Center.Anuradha Vikramhttp://www.kcet.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=1834&id=17328

Yael Lipschutz is 18th Street Arts Center's 2013-14 Curator-in-Residence. She is a curator and art historian whose focus is on under-recognized artists from the recent history of Los Angeles. As Archivist for the Noah Purifoy Foundation, she has been instrumental in bringing this important artist's work and message to a broader public. She is collaborating with two Los Angeles museums on retrospectives of influential but lesser known artists, Purifoy and the Beat-era occultist and painter Cameron, who was associated with Wallace Berman's Semina circle. She has curated exhibitions including For the Martian Chronicles at L&M Arts in Venice, a group show that paid homage to the late science fiction writer Ray Bradbury. For Pacific Standard Time, she curated a shooting range where artists shot at targets of their own making, in reference to Niki de St Phalle's "Shooting Pictures" created in the California desert 50 years before. Lipschutz, who earned her PhD from USC, is a curator who favors the offbeat over the academic. These different projects all reflect her love of iconoclastic artists, defined by deeply personal visions, whose work and visibility benefit greatly from her scholarly attention.

Yael Lipschutz's work with the Noah Purifoy Foundation has, in its own right, firmly established her dedication to Los Angeles art history. With Franklin Sirmans, she is also the co-curator of Purifoy's upcoming retrospective exhibition at LACMA to open in spring 2015. Purifoy, who died in 2004, spent much of his life working in the city and was deeply affected by the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Lipschutz writes, "For Purifoy, what was lost in the rebellion was an ideal: the ideal of the commodity -- as -- life -- fulfilling -- wish -- image; the lifestyle this ideal implied (bourgeois); the idea that obtaining such a lifestyle would somehow allow one to move past the racial/class barriers that structured African American life."1 His work took a similar turn as he began to work with discarded materials and detritus of the streets and to abandon his earlier Modernist aesthetic. Purifoy pursued his commitment to humble forms of art-making and to art education with great passion, and abandoned art for decades with equal fervor. His resurrection as an artist came after years of working as a social worker in public mental health services, after which time he was invited to serve on the California Arts Council and reengaged as a leader for social change through the arts. Purifoy's Foundation is on the site where he developed a large outdoor sculpture installation, late in his life, after having abandoned or destroyed much of his earlier creative output. He is an artist whose community-oriented values and keen sense of social justice resonate strongly with 18th Street Arts Center's own founding mission.

Lipschutz is also adding to the list of canonical women in the arts by mounting a retrospective of the art of Cameron. Marjorie Cameron was an artist, writer, and occultist who lived and worked in the Los Angeles area in an era when these interests were strong but underground. Her role in Kenneth Anger's film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome made her out to be a dark priestess, but her qualifications for that role were established through her marriage to Jack Parsons. Parsons was a jet propulsion engineer and acolyte of Aleister Crowley. Cameron's paintings incorporate pagan iconography in a Surrealist vein that was enhanced by her time spent in Mexico, a haven for mid-century women artists including Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington. Back in California in the 1950s, Cameron grew close to poet Wallace Berman and graced the cover of the first issue of his influential journal of art and literature, Semina. Lipschutz is developing this exhibition in partnership with MOCA, to open in October 2014.

A recent group show curated by Lipschutz addressed the connections between science and mysticism in a different way than Cameron's occultism, through the medium of science fiction and the beloved writer Ray Bradbury. The Los Angeles Times review of For the Martian Chronicles praised how "The smart installation makes terra firma feel extraterrestrial. Realism segues into science fiction as objectivity gives way to something stranger and stronger than subjectivity."2 For the Martian Chronicles grew from the history of now-defunct Venice gallery L&M Arts, which was built on a site once occupied by a house where Bradbury wrote his famous novel, The Martian Chronicles. Lipschutz organized the show in memoriam to the late writer, including artists Yves Klein, Vija Celmins, Ed Ruscha, and John McCracken, whose works addressed the topic of Mars directly to varying degrees. Some works reflected the alienation and sterility of space travel, others wrestled with the implications of other worlds. Lipschutz also curated a film program for the exhibition, including works by Matthew Ritchie, Kenneth Anger, and Scoli Acosta that resonated with her theme of cosmic consciousness.

The environment of Mars envisioned by Ray Bradbury is not wholly dissimilar from that of the desert. "I am also very interested in artists' relationship to the Mojave desert, where I was born," Lipschutz says. "Some years ago I organized an exhibition about the desert called 'Somewhere on a Desert Highway,' and I am currently working towards a major site-specific exhibition in the desert." For Somewhere On a Desert Highway at JK Gallery in Los Angeles in 2010, she invited six local artists including John Outterbridge and Ben Patterson to respond to the city's relationship to the desert from which it was wrested. More recently, in 2012 Lipschutz organized a group of artists to create and destroy targets in Niki de Saint Phalle Tirs: Reloaded, an homage to French artist Niki de Saint Phalle's Shooting Paintings of 1962. Eschewing the gallery for a shooting range, Lipschutz' contribution to Pacific Standard Time's Performance and Public Art Festival was inspired by De Saint Phalle's creation of these works in the California desert with the assistance of her partner, Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, and Los Angeles artist Ed Kienholz. Kienholz' son Noah provided the armory from his father's collection of weapons used by artists to hit their artistic targets at the event. For the re-enactment, Lipschutz invited Los Angeles artists including Alexandra Grant, Brigitte Zieger, and Lara Schnitger to create their own painted or sculpted "targets" to destroy in a celebration of the cycle of life and death. Writing in Art in America, Paul David Young expressed how the original Tirs was rooted in de Saint Phalle's "struggles as a French woman in the years immediately after the bloody Algerian revolution and the ensuing consternation of France as a soon-to-be post-colonial empire. The obviously political nature of the assemblages took on issues of race relations, gender equality, and the authoritarian state." Tirs: Reloaded had a more festive approach: "guests greeted the gunfire and explosions with pleasure, awarding each of the riflepersons with polite applause, like at a golf tournament."3 Despite the lighthearted tone, Lipschutz' motivation was to celebrate both the exuberance and the criticality of de Saint Phalle's work.

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For her residency at 18th Street Arts Center, Lipschutz is developing a new body of research around the intersection of art and technology. Specifically, she is interested in the developing field of robotics and how that technology has deviated from anthropomorphic forms into a space of machine biology that is uncanny in its adherence to, as well as its deviation from, animal norms. Lipschutz is convening a panel of notable curators of art and tech, including Zhang Ga and Julia Kaganskiy, who are leading efforts by museums globally to address the needs of artists working with technology and to bridge the distance between inventors who use engineering and those who use art as their medium. Lipschutz' interests reflect her awareness of Santa Monica's evolution into a new technology stronghold in the Los Angeles area, and her commitment to engaging new audiences for contemporary art.

18th Street Arts Center's annual award for a California curator is a yearlong residency designed to support curatorial research and to promote the development of critical discourse in the field of contemporary art. Through this initiative, 18th Street Arts Center rewards innovative curators with time, space, and a $10,000 prize to investigate and develop ideas within a thematic framework fundamental to his or her practice.